My roommate and I went out to get some Pho soup in La Jolla today. Generally when you get a bowl of Pho, you also get a plate of side-vegetables to add to the soup. But when we got our two bowls of soup today, he brought only one side-plate of veggies.

Immediately, I started bitching. I felt that I should have my own veggies. My roommate, unfazed, calmly called over the waiter and got the second plate of vegetables. By the time the meal was done, we had gone through only 80% of the first plate of side-vegetables. The second plate remained untouched.

I noticed then that while I went immediately to fight a perceived injustice, my roommate just let it go. We then had a long discussion about the matter.

I couldn’t fall asleep.

We are the men made of memory.

Our bones ache with regret.

I had to save a file for my Master’s program for the first time today – so I had to move out my old college stuff. I did the same thing when I left high school. I moved everything in the “School” folder to “Archive” and renamed it “High School”. Now I’m going to do the same thing with “College”. And another chapter closes.

I’ve been working full time since June, and am now starting to pile up a substantial sum in my bank account. But it’s just been sitting there in Checking getting eaten away by inflation.

Here are the ways I’ve found to enhance savings at these types of figures:

401k

I realized over the last few days that work is taking up more and more of my life. But it’s diminishing marginal utility: as it eats up more of my life, it’s not giving me extra utility, and taking away time from other things.

What’s the motivation for working hard? Well, many people would say that working hard is good to advance in the corporate ladder and make more money etc. However, looking at my personal mission statement, which I wrote a few months ago, I can’t find status or money as being particularly important.

I think that’s accurate. Money and status pretty much only bring me happiness to the extent that they aid in the other missions I’ve written down: namely to be an explorer and seek out new experiences. And it has helped. I bought a one-on-one lesson last Saturday on how to surf – and it worked – now I know. That was very rewarding.

So what does this mean? I’ll keep in mind that doing things at work isn’t really an end to itself – and to place some boundaries so that my life doesn’t get out of balance. Hitting personal objectives will come before hitting corporate ones. Selfish? Sure.

So one concrete action item: acquire and maintain a paper schedule book that’s independent of the Outlook one provided by work. The work one only covers work – I’ll flow only the important things down to my real schedule book.

Started in Spring 2009 – an ongoing process.

For myself, I will:

• Not compromise with honesty.

I stepped outside and after looking around awkwardly a bit, I started running. When was the last time you ran as fast as you could? I feel like when I was a kid, I was always sprinting – always playing some game which involved beating someone somewhere by foot. I can’t even remember the last time I did that though.

The ground passed under frighteningly fast and my legs were unusually long. Probably beacuse the vast majority of my experience sprinting was when I was much shorter. We take things at a much more comfortable walk or jog now.

My life is in a state of high entropy right now.

Let’s start with health. Three weeks ago, I got a nasty bit of poison oak on me, and am now just clearing up all the rashes. I’ve been gone to an exhausting conference in humid northern Virginia for a week, so I haven’t exercised and have been eating fatty food for a week. Additionally I’ve not been getting great sleep. As a result, I’m regrouping there – trying to heal my rashes and canker sores in my mouth (which appear whenever I’m in a state of high stress – like a health coal mine canary).

Sounds bad. I’m also in a pretty bad housing state. My sublet runs out in a week, and I haven’t yet found a new place to live in San Diego. My lease in LA ends this week also, and I still need to move out my furniture and get my deposit back. So I need to close out two leases and start a new one.

Physically, my possessions are in a mess. I packed hastily and now am on my third of four laundry loads to clean all my shit. I lost another fountain pen. I need to get another out of storage.

Work-wise, I’ve missed a week, so I have no idea what the status of my project is. I’m not too worried about that. I also need to make sure my grad school bills are paid so I can start my masters class this quarter.

Regardless of all that shit, I’m not too stressed. I’m just glad to be back in San Diego. Fuck the east coast – hot-ass, humid-ass, bullshit. I have a working car and enough liquid assets to be fine. I just need to attack all my issues methodically and get down to low entropy – so I can start drinking alone again.

I got poison oak two Saturdays ago volunteering for a local park to clear out non-native plants. I think I consumed more societal resources getting medical treatment than I contributed.

I was still able to go to work though, due to my strict regimen of anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and antihistamines – all washed down with some booze for double potency.

My arms looked like hell, but that was okay. The oozing, the pus, the rotting, the moral decay – it was all hidden beneath the snow white shirtsleeves I usually sport to work.

—

Despite my nightly chemical cocktail, I still had a bit of trouble sleeping last night. I dreamed I was a college freshman again at the arboreal UC Davis. I was going to study English and religion – and I was very excited.

Then I woke up and went to work. I feel like I spend 40 hours a week pretending to be someone else – someone professional. And I like that person more than myself.

I had a dream that I was with a (female) friend waiting for the city bus after school. This must have been in middle school, because that was the only time I took a city bus. We were waiting apart from the others in a building across the street… watching through a window on the second story those behemoths come, pick up children, and pass.

I asked her when our bus was going to come. She said we were waiting for #39, it was now 3:50, and the next one came at 4:30. I thought then how much better it was to own a personal automobile.

And it came to pass that her parents came to pick her up. I thought about asking for a ride home, since we lived nearby, but for some reason I chickened out and she left.

I was left there watching the across-the-street. Time passed until – could it be? It was my bus! I scurried towards the building exit – but found that the building exit was this narrow hole through this metal grate.

Perhaps in a yesteryear I could have easily fit through this hole. But today I put one arm through, and then my head, but then my other arm was stuck. I could put both arms through, but my shoulders were stuck. No matter which way I went about it, I was now too big to fit through the entrance of my fictious childhood hideout.

Then I woke up and drove to work.

I spent four years going to school at UCLA, where I had ambiguous feelings about being living in a big city with a high population density.

After I had gone through the last of my graduations, my parents left. And I, in my apartment alone, unceremoniously packed up the tidbits I had collected over the four years into a some beige cardboard boxes.

Going up the 405, a song by Bob Seger came on the radio:

On a typical day in acting class we’ll go in there and first thing we do is “warm up” – we’ll stand in a circle and do jumping jacks or try to figure out how to spin our arms in opposite directions. We might play a game in which we walk around imitating animals or making noises.

Tuesday we got up in groups to imitate a factory (using our bodies and making sounds) manufacturing “happy frogs”. Today we got up in groups to do the “Ipod shuffle”, which entailed impromptu performing random songs. If you didn’t know the lyrics, you hummed along or made sounds to represent instruments. Each group had to iterate through about 15 songs.

I don’t think anyone would do this outside of class. In fact, on the first day we were all very shy about doing these “retarded” things, but we slowly got out of our shells. The main message of the class is to not be afraid of failure – that is, it’s better to try very hard and fail spectacularly than to go out with a whimper – that any self-conscious restraint in the realm of performance increases the chance of actual failure. I like this message – I think it’s very true of both theatrical performance and also the performance of many tasks/activities in everyday life.

There’s a small room in McGowan where I go every Tuesday and Thursday. In this room with black walls, I loosen up and fear failure less. There I am probably the closest to my child-self: unafraid to play pretend and unconcerned about looking cool.

So why don’t I expand this small black room into the whole world?

I am amazed that the whole theater company idea is taking off from the ground. It’s not even one particular person – I’m just shocked that so many people seem dedicated to making this work. Maybe it’s a bit early to count our chicks, but it sure seems to be working out. I suppose the limits to our potential as humans really must be only our willpower and energy in changing the world state from the status quo to one of our liking.

Come audition! http://www.sweetsorrowco.com.

Everything I know and think during the day denies your existence. I do not worship you because I know that if you were real, you would not want me to. Certainly I am allowed to talk to you though, as an equal, of course, even though you already know what I have to say:

I do not know what I have done to deserve the blessings I’ve been given. And even though I spend most of my time thinking of the one I don’t have rather than the thousand I do, believe me when I say in a rare moment of clarity and perspective that I am deeply grateful.

I want to know what I can do to merit what I have already been given. Sure, part of it is just an irrational fear that I in fact do not deserve these things and the faucet of blessings will be shortly stoppered. Forgive me, I am weak – but let’s assume that at least part of my intentions are noble.

Maybe this is a start: I will try to be more charitable towards the weaknesses of others. And I will do this from the perspective of humility: that I have had more advantages than average yet still fall victim to weaknesses. I have to forgive others before I can forgive myself.

So today in physics club we were building a cloud chamber, which I was responsible for getting the materials for. I accidentally left the isopropyl alcohol, a critical component, in my apartment. So in my embarrassment, I quietly took my friend who advised me aside, told him the situation, and I ran back to my apartment to get it. It took around 20 minutes to go back and forth.

When I get back, I learn that one of the members who worked in a lab downstairs had high grade isopropyl readily available which could have been gotten in 3 minutes. A small mistake, sure, but I think it illustrates what might be a good principle: mistakes should be made public so they are fixed in the most effective manner. It’s less important to worry about who fucked up (me) and more important to fix the fuck-up.

I was lying in bed a few minutes ago and thought of winter break all of a sudden. What did I do during winter break? I tried hard and remembered climbing Mt. Wilson and going to a bar for the first time. But it still took a few seconds. And I only thought of two days – two days out of the 14 to 20 of complete leisure.

What did I do those other days? Probably I spent quality time with my friends and family in the prime of life – enjoying a friendship closer than perhaps I’ll ever have again. If only I could remember what I did…

What week of school is it now? Eighth or something? I’m thinking: today was Wednesday. I did fencing today; that was fun – which means tomorrow is Thursday, all I have to do is go to solid state physics class. Maybe I’ll play racquetball tomorrow – I always enjoy that. Maybe I’ll follow a friend to a party I wasn’t invited to. Those are usually fun, but…

And as I go to bed bruised beaten bleeding from a small cut and exhausted (fencing tournament), I realize that tomorrow morning I have to get up and go do battle – not physical this time, but more, not less, important. My thoughts at the moment are a bit scattered, so forgive… no, nevermind, I have no apologies. Read on or leave – it is what it is.

Human nature is such that we see more clearly, or perhaps just in a prettier white glow, the state of the world as it could be, should be, rather than how it currently is. Don’t deny it. Even the homeless man dreams of a future where his bottle of liquor is full.

We want a world is which we are at the top of the silly little hierarchies we deem important. It’s more accurate to say though, that we dream of being at the top of the most important hierarchy we think we have a shot of summiting. Some wish to be Secretary of State, others captain of the bowling team.

The first time I took the GREs, I wrote my essay section the same way I always write: hilarious and to-the-point. I got a score of 4 out of a total of 6. It was a 37th percentile score, and fuck, I don’t admit to be 37th percentile at anything.

It bothered me so much that I signed up to take it again. This time I wrote the most formulaic, long-winded, cliché piece of shit I have ever been ashamed to have my name attached to. I got a perfect score and am now in the top 3 percent of douchebags nationwide. So if you ever have to take the GRE writing, don’t make the same mistake I did. Conform. Don’t be original. These people wouldn’t recognize beauty if an angel came down and bitch-slapped them.

So I was on Google news today and one Reuters video caught my eye: “Playboy goes digital”, and so, my curiosity naturally piqued, I click the link. A new window pops up and a video starts loading. ‘Excellent’, I think, ‘just what I’m looking for’ — except Reuters had changed the video or something and instead it loads “Gaza families’ struggle for food”. I instinctively close the window like it was porn or something. And now I feel like an asshole.

These days are a time for gratitude and renewal, and here’s my thoughts on this:

I don’t know if there is a supreme being out there – but if there is, I am sure He is benevolent.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

One thing I wish to do in particular is to expect less. And I don’t mean “less” in the mathematical-left-on-the-number-line kind of “less”, but rather I hope to not expect either good or evil tidings.

I want more surprise, less “statistically probable”. And I’m okay with more bruises for the bad, if I can find more gratitude in the good. As the next year begins, I am sure the world will give and the world will take – let me be grateful for what is left in the end.